Basketball Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo has made an impact far beyond the game

Finger wagging. A huge smile. An unmistakable voice. Dikembe Mutombo played defense with a level and talent that few players in basketball history have ever had, and that’s just one of many reasons why he was immortalized in the Hall of Fame.

He stopped people on the court.

Off the field, he helped people.

Simply put, this is the legacy of Mutombo, a 7-foot-tall center’s towering figure who died on Monday, about two years after his family revealed he was battling brain cancer. The tributes started when the news spread and never ended. Current and former players. Team and league directors. Even world leaders; Barack Obama, who has hosted Mutombo in the White House more than once, spoke, as did Felix Tshisekedi, president of Congo, Mutombo’s homeland.

They all said the same thing in different ways. Mutombo touched people’s lives in one way or another.

“Dikembe Mutombo was an incredible basketball player — one of the greatest shot blockers and defenders of all time,” Obama wrote on social media on Monday. “But he also inspired a generation of young people across Africa, and his work as the NBA’s first global ambassador changed the way athletes think about their impact off the court.”

When Mutombo wanted something done, it was done. He built a hospital in Congo that – named after his mother – now treats around 200,000 people. He worked tirelessly on behalf of Special Olympics, UNICEF, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He traveled around the world, encouraged NBA leaders to visit Africa, and fought for change. He was the first and still only person to win the NBA Citizenship Award twice. J. Walter Kennedy.

“His legacy of what he did off the court will long outlive what he did on the court,” one of his former coaches, Hall of Famer Dan Issel, said Monday.

Issel coached Mutombo in Denver, where they participated in the first-ever NBA playoff game in which the Nuggets overtook Seattle in a best-of-five series in 1994, and Mutombo finished the game as the game ended, lying flat on his back, holding the ball above head with absolute joy on his face.

It was an iconic moment. But Mutombo’s iconic move was the finger wave – which would explode after blocking a shot, with his index finger moving back and forth as if saying “no, no, no” to the shooters he had just dismissed. This is legendary. It didn’t start this way.

“I think he was called for a technical inspection the first time,” Issel said. “That’s why the NBA made it a rule that they liked it so much that they just didn’t want him doing it to someone’s face. So then they said, “Hey, if you turn to the crowd and move your finger, everything will be fine.” Just don’t do it to the face of the player you just blocked.’”

Mutombo spent 18 seasons in the NBA, playing for Denver, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, New York and the then-New Jersey Nets. The 6-foot-7 center from Georgetown was an eight-time All-Star, a four-time Defensive Player of the Year, a three-time All-NBA selection and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015 after averaging 9.8 and 10.3 rebounds per game in his career.

His speech in Springfield, Massachusetts on induction night lasted approximately 9 minutes. And he probably spent 8 1/2 of those minutes talking about everyone else instead of his own achievements. As Hall of Fame presenters, he was joined on stage by John Thompson, his coach at Georgetown and then-NBA commissioner David Stern. From Thompson he learned basketball and how to look at the world. Stern gave him the opportunity to use the NBA platform to change the world. He couldn’t thank any of them enough.

“The spirit of Dikembe Mutombo will never be forgotten,” said Philadelphia guard Kyle Lowry, who was Mutombo’s teammate in his final NBA season with Houston in 2008-09. “I think anyone who was ever around, who ever met him, knows what a great man he was. He has a wonderful family and wonderful children. This is a great loss for our league, our world.

There will be no more finger-wagging. That voice – he had been compared to Cookie Monster and Mutombo always saw humor in it – had been silenced. Mutombo disappeared. Legacy doesn’t. It will never be like this.

And if one had to sum up Mutombo’s extraordinary life in one sentence, there would be no better choice than the one he himself used at the end of his Hall of Fame speech.

“I may not have won the championship,” he said that night, “but to a lot of people I am a champion.”

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AP Sports Writers Pat Graham and Dan Gelston contributed.

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